MIT EECS Master of Engineering:
a Status Report

Two years ago at this conference (1) we reported our plans for a five-year
program in electrical engineering and computer science, leading to the
simultaneous award of bachelor's and master's degrees. An update on our plans
(2) was presented one year ago. The program has now started and we can
describe the implementation and some preliminary results.

WHY IS CHANGE REALLY NEEDED?

The new program was motivated by three distinct changes that have occurred since
the last major changes in engineering education:

Changes in technology

The technology we teach has changed in at least two major ways in recent decades.
First, there is a higher digital, as opposed to analog, content in most systems
that electrical engineers deal with. Coverage of analog circuits,
electromagnetism, and classical control theory must be accompanied by more
exposure to digital systems and computation. Second, advances in
microelectronics have made it possible to design and fabricate very complex
systems, with superior performance, very cheaply. Today the disciplines of
computer science and electrical engineering, once considered separate or
diverging, are closer than ever.

Changes in career needs

Today's engineers, more than ever before, need an appreciation of the societal,
business, technical, and human context in which the process or product being
designed will work. Gone are the days (if indeed they were ever here) when an
engineer designed, to a specification generated by someone else, a product to
be manufactured by others. Engineers are now expected to participate in
marketing, product definition, manufacturing, cost control, and many
nontechnological aspects of the job.

Changes in society

Finally, society has benefited greatly from new electrical and computer
technology and from such products as global wideband communications, personal
computers, and other products with embedded computation. We are just beginning
to feel the effects of this information revolution. Yet society is still led,
by and large, by people without a deep understanding of science and technology,
who cannot appreciate either the technical advances nor their significance and
potential. Society needs leaders who are technology-literate. General
universities are not filling the need. Maybe it is up to us engineers. If so,
we should provide science- and engineering-based general education.

These three external changes call for changes in engineering education. Our
new Master of Engineering (M.Eng.) program is designed to meet this need. It
has more technical material and a seamless merging of electrical engineering and
computer science. It has room for contextual material. The bachelor's degree
portion provides an excellent general education grounded in science and technology.

EDUCATIONAL GOALS

In our zeal to make our graduates fit the needs of society, we must not forget
that our primary mission is to educate young people for a successful life, not
merely a successful career. Another way of saying this is to note that our
customers are not society or prospective employers, but rather the students
themselves. They have all the usual problems of young people growing up. They
cannot be successful in either career or life without understanding themselves,
understanding society, and appreciating the diversity of thought, method, and
style they will encounter.

However, engineering education is more than general education. Our students
need enough preparation for immediate and, if they wish, lifelong employment as
an engineer. They need the necessary mathematical tools, the scientific basics,
and a knowledge of their particular engineering discipline, and they also should
know (or quickly learn on the job) the way engineers work.

Beyond this, we need to ensure that our education prepares students to do things
besides act as engineers. Many if not most of our students will experience
career changes more than once after they graduate. We want their engineering
education to be an enabling foundation, not a confining one.

With all this in mind, we believe that a modern engineering graduate requires at
least the following:

Foundations: understanding of fundamental science and engineering of
permanent value;

Breadth: familiarity with many important areas, including for our students
both EE and CS;

Depth: ability to deal with specialists, or become one if necessary;

Leadership: judgment and appreciation of the "bigger picture;"

Design: experience with creative, synthetic, integrative activities;

Curiosity: desire and ability to keep learning throughout life;

Communications skills: ability to express ideas persuasively, in written
and oral form;

Social skills: ability to interact with others, in professional and social
settings;

Global view: appreciation of diversity in the world and in intellectual
areas;

Personal strength: ability to cope with life's various difficulties.

The department may not be responsible for satisfying all these needs, but it
certainly is for the first six or seven. There are specific features in our
new curricula that address these, and there are other programs at our
university for the remainder.

THE MASTER OF ENGINEERING PROGRAM

We will describe our new program from three different points of view. First,
we describe the structure we have selected. Next we discuss the content of
the curriculum. Finally, we report how the resources needed for the program
have been estimated and secured.

Structure

We concluded that it is no longer possible to cover the needs outlined above
in four years, without seriously compromising the technical content. The fact
that four years is not enough has not escaped the attention of our graduates,
since most of them continue for a master's degree, at MIT or elsewhere, either
immediately or after some work experience. Their employers agree, and usually
support them in their further schooling.

Our new M.Eng. program enables our students to have this experience here at MIT,
with a minimum of fuss and a great deal of flexibility. Previously most of our
own students could not pursue a master's degree here, because we thought of the
master's program as a prelude to the doctoral program, and only admitted those
few whom we deemed capable of writing a doctoral thesis. This high standard,
not relevant for a program like the M.Eng. which is intended to prepare people
for an engineering career, is now only used for those seeking the Ph.D.
Admission to the M.Eng. program is based on whether a student is capable of
taking graduate-level courses and handling a short thesis project.

In four years it is still possible to provide an excellent general education
based on science and technology, even if not one that will be a suitable
preparation for the practice of engineering. We have retained four-year S.B.
degrees for those who want to do things other than engineering, or who want to
attend graduate school elsewhere, or who may want an entry-level engineering
position. These are honorable degrees that serve a valid purpose.

The M.Eng. degree is awarded after five years of study. Its requirements
include the requirements of our bachelor's degree as a subset, and normally
the two degrees are awarded simultaneously. The program is designed to be
seamless with respect to the traditional boundary between undergraduate and
graduate education. That is, continuation to the fifth year resembles the
transition between the third and fourth years, more than the traditional steps
of graduation followed by entrance to graduate school. Students know at the
end of their third year if they have this opportunity, and can plan accordingly.
They can optimize their schedule, for example by postponing some of the
undergraduate requirements until the fifth year, or by taking early a
specialized graduate course that is not offered every year.

The new curriculum is also seamless in another dimension. For twenty years
we have had two S.B. degree programs, in EE and in CS, with different
requirements and structures. For the S.B. part of the new program we designed
a single structure into which both curricula fit naturally, with overlapping
courses. This had a major benefit. A student can now follow a personalized
curriculum that is neither EE nor CS but is sort of in-between, yet just as
rigorous. We are calling this new, more flexible, curriculum EECS (electrical
engineering and computer science). For the benefit of students who (we presume)
will want either EE or CS to appear on their diplomas, we have designed the ESE
(electrical science and engineering) and CSE (computer science and engineering)
curricula. It was easy -- we simply replaced a few restricted electives with
required courses to force some specialization. A student does not need to
declare which of the three S.B. degrees is expected until the last semester.
The ESE and CSE curricula are accredited, and we expect the new, more flexible
EECS curriculum to be accredited soon.

Content

We listed above ten things that our graduates need. We now explain the features
of the new M.Eng. and S.B. curricula that help provide each.

Let us start at the bottom of the list. The last four items are important for
all students, not only those in engineering. They are part of any good general
education, and courses to provide them are prescribed by the university and
taught outside the department. There is an extensive humanities requirement
(twice as much as ABET requires) and a writing requirement. Because these needs
apply to all our students, they are part of both the M.Eng. and the S.B. curricula.

Now at the top of the list, the cornerstone of any engineering education is the
technical content. Some have advocated that departments reduce the
engineering-science content of curricula to make room for also-needed material
devoted to context, practice, ethics, and other nontechnical topics. On the
other hand, the ability of engineers to keep up with rapid advances depends on
their understanding of fundamental technical material of permanent value and
relevance. For the past forty years engineering education has been served well
by its emphasis on engineering science. Our new curricula have a stronger, not
weaker, technical content. The freshman core (physics, math, chemistry, and
now also biology) is common for students in all departments. The curricula
continue with laboratory experience and technical courses in EECS. All
department students take four courses in the basics of electrical engineering
and computer science, plus some advanced mathematics.

Facility with mathematics is essential for engineers. Our curricula include two
courses in calculus, one in differential equations, and for most students one in
probability and one in discrete mathematics.

The need for breadth and depth is satisfied by a requirement that students select
nine EECS courses (5 for the S.B.) from seven lists grouped by topic:

artificial intelligence;

bioelectrical engineering;

communication, control, and signal processing;

computer systems and architecture;

devices, circuits and systems;

electrodynamics and energy systems;

theoretical computer science.

Each list contains a "header" course that is a prerequisite for most of the rest
of the list.

Some of these courses are in the EE side of the department and some are from CS.
Depth is assured by the requirement that three of the nine courses come from any
one of the seven lists; breadth is assured by a requirement that four of the courses
come two each from two other lists. The final two courses may come from any list.
The student has a great deal of flexibility in the choice of what to specialize in,
but must specialize in something. There is similar flexibility in the choice of
breadth. Students who wish their S.B. degree to be in either ESE or CSE simply make
their selections accordingly.

Design experience is distributed throughout the department courses. Each course
carries with it a certain number of "design points" and students must accumulate a
substantial number of points. Again there is great flexibility in the way
individual students can satisfy this requirement.

One of the goals listed above is the desire for continued learning throughout life.
There may not be a single best way to accomplish this goal, but several things help.
First, if the quality of instruction is high, then classroom learning can be fun.
Second, learning done under strong immediate motivation is effective, and hands-on
projects can provide such a setting. Finally, learning done with minimal detailed
guidance is usually ultimately satisfying, and the required thesis includes such
an experience.

Lastly, one of the items listed above remains to be discussed, the need of engineers
to appreciate the context of their work. Many students already have the right
attitude, but we have not figured out yet how to best help those who do not. This
area is perhaps the weakest part of the new curricula.

Resources

We expect to offer 80% of our undergraduates the opportunity to continue through
the fifth year to the M.Eng. degree, and we expect about 80% of those to accept our
offer. During the authorization process for the new program we wrote a business
plan. We estimated the additional number of course takings per year, and the
increases in thesis-supervision, classroom teaching, and advising loads. We
estimated classroom teaching to rise by 8%, thesis supervision by 3%, and advising
by 3%. We examined in detail the particular courses that would be taken and
judged whether additional faculty or teaching assistants would be needed.

We then estimated the increased resources needed. This amounted to a 3% increase
in faculty, a 10% increase in the number of TAs, and one support staff, for a
total budget increase of 5%. We then estimated the tuition from the additional
students, and demonstrated that the added revenue represented about 10% of our
budget. Thus the program pays its portion of central costs. It has a 50%
"gross margin," or, looked at another way, contributes at an effective overhead
rate of 100%.

We actually did this exercise not only for the eventual steady state, but for
each of three transition years, and the Provost is approving the increases on a
year-by-year basis.

An important question is how the students will pay for the fifth year of study.
They are only eligible for university-administered financial aid for their first
eight semesters on campus. We have estimated that a combination of additional
TA openings, some external fellowships (the students will qualify for most
fellowship competitions), and an increase in our industrially supported internship
program will cover over half the need. The rest would be covered by a combination
of family funds and loans. Other professional education, e.g. legal and medical,
is routinely financed by loans which are then paid back with the added earning
power conferred by the advanced degree. The same idea should work for engineering
education. To encourage this approach, the department has established a program
under which it will pay the interest on loans taken out by fifth-year students,
thereby making the loans interest-free until the student is done with the program.
At the time of writing, this program has just started and it is too early to tell
whether it will be effective.

STATUS

The Master of Engineering degree was approved by the MIT faculty in December, 1992.
About 25 seniors were immediately admitted to the program. They were selected from
a larger number who applied. Also, some of the students in our five-year
internship program elected to follow the new curriculum. As a result, 35 students
were in the first wave of M.Eng. graduates in 1994.

About 75 students from the class of '94 were admitted to the program in June 1993.
Members of this class were permitted to follow the new S.B. curriculum. As of this
writing we do not know how many of these will register as graduate students in Fall
1994, but we have in our business plan a target of 62 over and above historical
levels.

In the summer of 1994, about 130 juniors from the class of '95 were admitted. Our
target first-year graduate population of these people, in Fall 1996, is 100. This
is the planned steady-state population in later years. Most of the people in this
class are following the new S.B. curriculum, even if they are not planning to stay for
the M.Eng. Students in later classes are all expected to follow the new curriculum.

Two new courses are currently under development because the act of defining the new
curricula exposed a need for them. One is a course in discrete mathematics at the
sophomore level, and the other a junior course in signals, control, and
communications. These courses were offered during the past year to small groups of
students, and from now on will be taught to a much larger group.

To encourage M.Eng. students to develop oral-presentation skills, we held a
mini-conference called "EECS Master Works," where students gave talks on their
theses. The submissions were refereed, and prizes were awarded for the best
presentations.

During the past year or so, as the program has been implemented, many decisions
had to be made. The department administration paid great attention to details,
under the theory that if we did not, then the details would somehow pay attention
to us and we might not be pleased. We have attempted to make the program
consistent with all other programs of the department.

RESULTS

Although it is still too early for many lessons to have been learned from the
program, there are some things we can report.

Among the faculty and the students in the program there is high morale and
enthusiasm. Most of them sense that they are helping establish a new mode of
engineering education that eventually will, for good reasons, be adopted widely.
We hope this degree of excitement will continue in future years.

One result of interest involves the percentage of students who declare an
undergraduate major in electrical engineering vs. computer science. Traditionally
students have preferred ESE to CSE by a ratio of almost two to one. Members of
the class of '97, who selected a major in the summer of 1994 before their
sophomore year, had the opportunity to choose ESE, CSE, or the new, more flexible
EECS undergraduate major. The students apparently want the flexibility of the new
degree. Registration in the three majors was almost equally split, with each
drawing between 30% and 35% of the total.

We were initially concerned about the impact of the M.Eng. program on our highly
popular internship program. In many ways the structure of the new program is
based on that program. In particular, the internship program is a five-year one,
with three summers and one fall spent at an industrial plant, and with relatively
easy admission to the fifth year. The concern was that students might have been
interested in the internship program not because of its industrial experience, but
because it led to a master's degree. Now that the M.Eng. program has the same
easy admission, the fear was that a much smaller number of students would apply to
the internship program. We were pleased to find in Spring 1994 that there was as
much interest in the internship program as ever, so apparently our students have
been applying to it for the right reason.

Another concern had been that there would not be enough master's-level thesis
topics available, or that faculty members would only supervise doctor's theses,
because of their higher likelihood of leading to published papers. So far,
M.Eng. students have not had difficulty finding thesis topics and supervisors.
The real test, however, will come in future years when there will be more M.Eng.
students requiring theses.

Our new program violates the customary paradigm that the break between
classroom-intensive, structured education and research-oriented, apprenticeship
education occurs between undergraduate and graduate years. This paradigm was
deeply imbedded in administrative procedures throughout the department and the
university, and our new programs required a variety of changes. We have been
pleased at how cooperative all parts of the university have been, and how eager
people have been to help make the new program a success.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We wish to gratefully acknowledge the faculty members of the department for
the enthusiasm with which these curricular changes have been embraced. We also
wish to acknowledge the contributions of countless members of the MIT community,
both faculty and administration for their help in securing the necessary
approvals and for thoughtful committee deliberations.

AUTHORS

Since 1989 Professor Penfield has been Head of the Department of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
His technical interests have included solid-state microwave devices and
circuits, noise and thermodynamics, electrodynamics of moving media, circuit
theory, computer-aided design, APL language extensions, and computer-aided
fabrication of integrated circuits. Correspondence about this paper may be
directed to Prof. Penfield, Room 38-401, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139;
(617) 253-4601; penfield@mit.edu.

Since 1993 Professor Guttag has been Associate Head of the Department of
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He served on the
committee that designed the EECS Master of Engineering program. His technical
interests include software engineering and computer systems, particularly
programming methodology, formal specifications, theorem proving, and
programming languages.

Campbell L. Searle

Professor Searle retired in 1993 from MIT. Before then he chaired the
committee which designed the Master of Engineering program. His technical
interests have included solid-state circuits, semiconductor devices,
auditory perception, and modeling of the human auditory system.

William M. Siebert

Professor Siebert joined the MIT EECS faculty in 1952. Recently he served
on the committee that designed the EECS Master of Engineering program. His
technical interests include biomedical engineering, random-process theory,
and the application of communication and systems theory to the understanding
of physiological systems.